There are, of course, plenty of dangers facing children which need to be tackled and about which parents need to be alerted. But all too often the same authorities that are drawing up plans to scrutinize every adult who’s likely to come within a hundred yards of a child have proved themselves incapable of preventing actual cases of terrible abuse.

Most child abusers are family members or close friends who would be exempt from background checks or having to register with the authorities. And time and again, social services staff have failed to prevent children from being abused and killed by parents who were allowed to look after them despite overwhelming evidence that they were unfit to do so. The case of 17-month-old Peter Connelly, who was beaten and tortured to death by his mother and her boyfriend, is the most recent and horrific of many similar tragedies. Recently, a report branded the entire social services department of Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city, “unfit for purpose” after eight children under the care of social workers died in the last four years.

Then there are those offenders who either manage to slip through the cracks in a system prone to bureaucratic incompetence and overload or who only start abusing children once they’re in positions of responsibility. Last week, nursery worker Vanessa George admitted abusing toddlers in her care and sharing photos of her victims taken on her cellphone with fellow pedophiles. George passed the required background checks, and the nursery at which she worked passed regular inspections during the period in which she was committing her crimes.

There’s a balance to be struck between protecting children and preserving healthy relationships between children and adults, and it’s clear that the government and its legions of functionaries need to spend more time and resources on identifying and tackling real risks and less on addressing hypothetical ones. Parents increasingly face having decisions taken out of their hands by bureaucrats who spend their days compiling databases, prying into people’s private lives (Shepherd and Jarrett were actually reported by an anonymous neighbor; the government is keen to encourage such freelance snooping to help it control recalcitrant citizens), and cooking up new ways of curbing individual freedoms — preferably in the form of initiatives which provide revenue for the state in the form of registration fees and fines for non-compliance.

There are no doubt many officials who genuinely have the best interests of children at heart, but all too often they’re forced to work within the constraints of a flawed system. Others genuinely think they know better than parents how children should be raised, or simply enjoy being in a position where they can tell other people what to do. And underpinning this state of affairs is the liberal assumption that everyone can have a better life, free from danger, if only they’ll consent to letting the all-knowing, all-seeing state take more control over their lives.

The result is that relationships between young and old are being undermined, with growing numbers of children incapable of relating to adults outside their immediate family, many parents lacking the confidence to do what they think is right for their offspring, and adults in general becoming wary of attempting to interact with children.

Labour had to disown overtly statist policies in order to win power 12 years ago. Since then it has presided over the growth of a increasingly centralized, bureaucratic state, and this presents David Cameron’s Conservatives with a real opportunity to draw distinctions between themselves and Brown’s failed administration.

At a time when both parties are being forced to confront the reality of cuts in public spending, the Tories could start by pledging that under a Conservative government, the meddling, bullying officials who concern themselves with such things as the childcare arrangements of responsible parents will be the first to have their jobs abolished. They can then be retrained to do something useful instead — and leave parenting to parents and nannying to nannies.

Mike McNally is a journalist based in Bath, England. He posts at PJ Tatler and at his own blog Monkey Tennis, and tweets at @notoserfdom. When he's not writing about politics he writes about Photoshop.

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1.
DavidN

We’ve had similar discussions over on this side of the pond, about whether neighbors should be allowed to look after local kids. One suggested reason that the authorities are so opposed to such a thing would presumably apply on your side of the ocean: there’s a local daycare center, and either its owners want more business, or the union members who work there don’t like the competition. It gets pathetic, though, doesn’t it?

This is the way Labour always behaves. Why people were stupid enough to think, twelve years ago, that it would be any different, is beyond me. When the Tories get in, the first thing they should do is repeal every single law that this wretched government has passed in the last twelve disastrous years. Then sack anyone with “diversity” in their job title, and begin culling the quangos and shrinking the bloated public sector.

The paranoia surrounding children stops them having normal relationships with adults while doing nothing to stop real abuse. I have written about this subject here at PJM. How many paedophiles are there, for God’s sake?

This insanity isn’t confined to the UK. As I discussed at length at http://histruthis.blogspot.com/2009/09/talk-about-your-nanny-state.html, state officials in the US are threatening fines and jail for neighbors who watch each other’s children for less than an hour a day, without becoming licensed day care providers, and elsewhere are imposing reporting and training requirements on day care providers so burdensome that small-scale, non-professional providers could not possibly meet them. The “nanny” state, indeed!

Beating up a dysfunctional state like Great Britain is like beating up a blind man. Perhaps in less than a decade, Great Britain will no longer even exist as an organized country and will probably deconstruct into it’s component parts.

There is nothing with the exception of Muslim ranting that stinks worse than listening to Europeans moralize. The truth is that they must in fear of producing anthor abomination like Hitler or Mussillini. Before that Europe with the help of gods morality plundered the world. This moral highground that these British leaders pretend to have is arrogant. It is an illusion rooted in grandiosity and superiority. They should refocus that energy on what to do with all the radical immigrants they let populate there country.

The situation in Michigan with the mother who got into trouble for watching her neighbor’s children for a couple of hours before the school bus came shows that the nanny state is infultrating the US as well.

I thought the phrase was “it takes a village”, not “it takes the government”.

As the Liberals endeavor to eliminate Christianity which is the anchor to right living, we are seeing the State replace the conscience in people in our society. Judeo-Christianity is the core that prevents the meltdown into sexual and individual rampantness – runaway behavior into thuggishness. Without the gentleness of Christ (Christianity) and the Love of His Father (Judaism) we have no self anchor. Therefore people are lost and at the mercy of those who would ride over us in the most intimate of ways through our children. We may have had all the sexual freedom that we wanted, but now we will lose our children.

We have no such UNBELIEVABLE official statements in France (but we have others completely in the same crazy “mood”). Anyway, not so sure that, if our french administration would tell the same as portrayed in this article, it would not success. Here, the people rights are also very much assaulted by a bunch of technocratic demands. Keep faith in yourselves, anyway !

PS : By now, your hope and salvation consist in «rewilliaming» the english roots. How ? The idea is to reappropriate william symbolism, but updated to todays situation. You have to become the “invaders” of your own country (and not only the keepers)!
(not sure my english is good enough to be understood when i talk about metaphysic ^^ )

Britain is a nanny state. And it is behind the times. However, in my opinion, it is not dysfunctional. Its biggest problem is that it attempts to cling on to oldy feely values and lifestyles that just do not fit in the 21st centurey and they are way to easy pleezzy toward everyone, which makes almost nobody happy. At least they dont have as many shootings… just a few a year compared to thousands and thousands shot and wounded in the U.S annually. So america could use a shot of common sense and learn something from them..if they ever listened… at least the new president is a start in the right direction.

A ‘civilization’ that acts this way will soon reach the point where it deserves to collapse. And if it does not correct its ways, it eventually will collapse, for that will be the lesser of two evils. But neither the survival nor the collapse of such a ‘civilization’ is good. Return to virtue is the right way, but for some reason the Loony Bin left fears it beyond torture and death.